MM Thomas

New year, new theme! Just updated the theme of the site from minimal to paperMod

I submitted a copy of my dissertation tonight. Four years and it took me this long to realize what it takes to write something long. I learned a ton of accessory skills and ways of approaching problems and nomenclature too, but more than anything I think the last week have been very clear: if you want to write something long, you have to read a lot. If you want to finish it in a reasonable amount of time, it helps to approach it repeatedly. I watched this video during the pandemic (yes, it’s about Smash Bros.) and it reminded me of what it’s like to improve at something. You can’t force a ton of work every day. You’ll burn out. I can’t speak for people in other fields; but in fields that require mental activity, it’s extremely hard to know for sure when your mind will be the clearest. ...

I hate to keep doing this, but this is the first post of 2023. I am mostly doing this to grease the posting wheels. See you soon! -emem_tee

The Idea I generally work through silly pet projects to improve my fluency with a language or data analysis library. This month I’ve been trying to work through things I already know how to do with R and the tidyverse and implement them in a python script with pandas. This Week Here is one thing that I got through this week– I’m sure this is elementary to some, but if I’ve learned one thing in statistical programming, it’s that if something has annoyed me it’s probably also annoyed to someone else. ...

Alrighty, I have managed to fix the issue with not having the Hugo .exe file at a location where my shell (I use CMD in Windows) can find it. Pro Tip: Do not forget to click OK on ALL the dialogue boxes in the System Properties dialog box. Also make sure you restart your shell when testing. Now that I have that down, I just have to is navigate to my site’s directory (for me that’s .\emem-thomas.com) and enter the following, ...

Introduction A question I get often when talking to younger statisticians and data scientists is “how did you learn R”? The real/cheating answer I want to give first is “well I took a Java class and that made everything click wayyy smoother.” And although that’s an important step, taking one course in another language didn’t get me to where I am today. I should add that I have not learned R. I would argue there are very few people who really know R, especially because like any active language, it changes every few hours. Okay, that is a little hyberbolic, but the point I’m making is that even when you get good, there will always be ways to change what you’re doing for the better. ...

This Is yet another test unfortunately.

Connecting Reminder This incredibly helpful youtube video showed me how to connect the /Public directory of my Hugo site to the /public directory on my HostGator server space. It was helpful, and my real intent with this post is to prove that I can copy data from one folder to another. Here it goes!

Helloooo Everybody. Recording Live from Somewhere. This is my first blog post. It is short.

What is the point? Day 1 The overall point this time (I think) is that orthogonal and orthonormal are easy to mix up. I drew a little picture of Gon from Tekken because to orthoGONal vectors have a dot product of zero. I drew a bunch of Gons in neckties because an orthoNORMAL set of vectors is a bunch of normalized orthoGONal vectors. I am studying principal components analysis first. The principal components are the left hand side of the singular value decomposition of X in X = $X = UDV^T$ ...